Sara Larsen is the CMO of Brightcove, the leading provider of cloud services for video.

Getty

Getty

Since we closed out 2018 and welcomed 2019 with open arms, marketers have been reflecting back on accomplishments from the past year, while also looking ahead at what’s to come. The start of a new year is an exciting time for marketers. While it’s considered a fresh start, it’s also a time to evaluate what worked and what needs improvement.

As I think about the year ahead and what’s to come for marketers, here are the four trends that I predict.

Marketers will go beyond metrics and focus on return.

Analytics is such a wonderful tool because it gives marketers an idea of how well activities are performing -- how many people have viewed content and how many shares, likes, comments, the list goes on. While this data is extremely important to building an effective marketing strategy, in 2019, we’ll see marketers looking beyond the vanity metrics, with a heavier focus on the returns activities are bringing to the business.

Today, there are so many activities that are measurable -- email campaigns, videos, blog posts. Marketers need to look holistically at buying behavior and measure return across the business. No single activity or campaign can be solely attributed. It’s the pattern of activities that matters.

In 2019, we’ll see marketers asking themselves questions such as: Are we growing revenue? Are we increasing customer satisfaction? Are we improving customer retention? All play a role in understanding whether marketing campaigns are actually valuable, opposed to just focusing on how many likes they attracted, and will help marketers understand how their efforts are benefitting the business’s bottom line.

Data privacy and consumer trust will be prioritized.

As stated above, consumers’ trust was put to the test in 2018. Because of this, consumers are often hypersensitive to how their personal data is used. Who could blame them? While there were certainly some good things that came from data misuse, such as laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there were also cases that left consumers wary and distrustful.

In 2019, we’ll see a heavier focus from marketers to protect their customers’ information in order to respect their privacy and build up their trust again. We’ll also see this become a huge selling point because many consumers will no longer tolerate their data being used improperly. To ensure this is a priority at a business, customer privacy should be emphasized at the C-level and enforced companywide. This means taking extra precautions to ensure proper security services are in place and keeping all customer data internalized unless specified otherwise.

Video will go beyond just marketing.

Video is already a huge part of many companies’ marketing strategies, used across landing pages, email campaigns, social media and more. It’s safe to say that video has proven its value in marketing, and now we’re seeing it become a content consumption model that people use in all aspects of their lives.

As my company, Brightcove, offers solutions in the video space, we recently conducted a survey of enterprise employees and found that, of those employees who have watched a livestreaming video at work, 94% enjoy having at least one element of their workday livestreamed.

Based on what I am seeing, more recent video trends like livestreaming are being adopted in the workplace to streamline employee communication. And in the year ahead, we’ll see video being used beyond just marketing activities and for more internal communication efforts like all-staff meetings or new employee onboarding.

When leveraging video internally, you should work under the same standards and expectations that you would for external videos. For example, keep them short and sweet in order to keep the viewer engaged. Even internal videos can become lengthy and boring, so you want to make sure employees see their relevance and find them useful. Additionally, always ensure that the brand’s identity and personality are being expressed. This helps employees maintain consistency in both internal and external communications.

Visual content will continue to drive business decisions.

It’s common sense that humans are visual people; therefore, in the content marketing era, it’s about not just what content says but how it looks. We find that visual content tends to attract audiences’ attention more effectively than text can. For that reason, we’ll see marketers continuing to prioritize it in 2019 in order to build an effective marketing strategy.

Not only do visuals make for more appealing content, but there’s so much data that can be obtained from them as well. Take videos for example. Video analytics help marketers understand what types of videos are most often consumed, at what point someone stops watching, what time of day they like to watch and more. Other things to track and measure are whether content is bringing people to the website or if it’s being shared elsewhere. Each metric obtained from a piece of content is an insight that can be used for the next, so it’s important to understand each campaign’s impact on the business so you can assess what needs to be repeated or adjusted in the future.

As marketing continues to evolve -- each year at a seemingly more accelerated pace -- it’s becoming more critical for marketers to live up to consumer expectations by incorporating modern technologies, protecting consumer data and leveraging the types of content and mediums that consumers want to engage with. Looking at 2018, I think the marketing landscape evolved tremendously with more emphasis on video technologies, influencer marketing, shoppable content and more. But, there’s always room to grow and opportunities to build on what’s already established. I look forward to seeing what 2019 has to offer, as marketers continue to build stronger, more authentic connections with audiences.